The number of times Senator John McCain’s new advertisement attacking Senator Barack Obama for canceling a visit with wounded troops in Germany last week has been shown fully or partly on local, national and cable newscasts: well into the hundreds.
The number of times that spot actually, truly ran as a paid commercial: roughly a dozen.
Result for Mr. McCain: a public relations coup that allowed him to show his toughest campaign advertisement of the year — one widely panned as misleading — to millions of people, largely free, through television news media hungry for political news with arresting visual imagery.
Political campaigns have for years sought to broadcast their ads free by making them intriguing enough to draw wide coverage from news outlets.
And Mr. McCain’s campaign has proved particularly adept at getting such free air time in recent weeks, as news stations endlessly repeat the advertisements, which feature provocative visuals that can fill time during a relative lull in the campaign season.
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The free Sunday morning coverage also showed the limits of relying on news programs to carry advertising: A guest on “Face the Nation,” Senator Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who traveled with Mr. Obama abroad, called the spot “inappropriate”; Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said on “Fox News Sunday” that the ad was “beneath John McCain.”
Similarly, on MSNBC, the chief foreign affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, said Monday: “Obama had no intention of bringing cameras with him. I was there; I can vouch for that.”
Nevertheless, the advertisement ran in part or in full roughly two dozen times within the news coverage of MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, and less frequently on CNN, according to a review on ShadowTV, a database of programming on cable and nearly 100 television stations.
Early Tuesday morning Brooke Wagner, an anchor at the CBS affiliate in Denver — where the ad first ran Saturday night, on the NBC affiliate — again introduced the spot. “A new TV commercial from John McCain is criticizing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama,” Ms. Wagner reported, before showing much of the ad.More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/politics/30ads.htmlHere we go again.
Two can play at this game- except that our side won't, because that would be "negative" and "we need to take the high road."